Dynamic Binary Countdown for Massive IoT Random Access in Dense 5G Networks

Massive connectivity for Internet of Things applications is expected to challenge the way access reservation protocols are designed in 5G networks. Since the number of devices and their density are envisioned to be orders of magnitude larger, state-of-the-art access reservation, Random Access (RA) procedure, might be a bottleneck for end-to-end delay. This would be especially challenging for burst arrival scenarios: Semi-synchronous triggering of a large number of devices due to a common event (blackout, emergency alarm, etc.). In this article, to improve RA procedure scalability, we propose to combine Binary Countdown Contention Resolution (BCCR) with the state-of-the-art Access Class Barring (ACB). We present a joint analysis of ACB and BCCR and apply a framework for treating RA as a bi-objective optimization, minimizing the resource consumption and maximizing the throughput of the procedure in every contention round. We use this framework to devise dynamic load-adaptive algorithm and simulatively illustrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the burst resolution delay while consuming less resources compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.